The "Take No Responsibility" culture

I don't know what it is about the place I work at, but more often than not people just seem to not want to take responsibility for bits of work and I'm honestly not sure why? We're supposed to work in a no blame culture where if things go wrong then we try to understand what happened and learn from it so we don't repeat it.

But some people seem totally averse to anything resembling it. It's like they have the idea if something goes wrong they are going to be horribly blamed for it and so don't want to make any decisions, buck pass, play slopey shoulders and generally hope to ignore it until it goes away.

Anyone got any good ideas how to convince these people why taking up some of the slack is a good idea or why they might think like this?

Anyone got any good ideas how to convince these people why taking up some of the slack is a good idea or why they might think like this?

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Good luck. We had to deal with the local dignitary who was fine using things people bought out of their own money. Fairly standard, but she then expected other people to purchase things if she noticed they were missing: literally shout to the ether that "we don't have X" and expect X to appear.

As the saying goes: Document, document, document. Put it all in writing because the point is not only to show that you did everything you could, but that when you asked for the decisions to be made, it didn't happen.

The other one I have used sparingly to stop people getting too wise to the fact is to add a line or two at the bottom of the email, saying that if they don't write to your with their decision, the decision will be the assumed to be X. At that point they either make the decision and you get it in writing, or they ignore it and it bites them later on when you produce the email. Yes, it's an underhand tactic, but it unfortunately has a reasonable success rate.